


The Battles Won but the War?

by Noirkatrose



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Death, Destruction, Hurt Steve, Other, PTSD, Right., War, amputations, mentions of Shell shock( PTSD), umm... - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 13:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4480181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noirkatrose/pseuds/Noirkatrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an AU based around what might have happened if Steve survived and escaped the crash. In this particular one he is rescued and taken to a Russian Outpost. Later he he is attacked and well, spoilers!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Battles Won but the War?

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own; just playing!  
> Right- there is a few triggers in here, specifically: PTSD, Amputations, Blood, Gore (etc), and Kidnapping. Have Fun!  
> Also- This is part of a bigger piece I'm attempting to write that I need a beta for...*pretty please*? I can do metaphorical cookies, etc.

Later, he would look back and realize that not even the best mirage would have stank as much as the people who found him. But at the time he'd been wandering the ice for what felt like an age. His right foot burned with cold and his left- well, the less said about that the better. He'd seen multiple visions of Bucky, Peggy, and the Commandos. There had even been one of his mom. So tall fur covered men with large beards? He just thought it was another one. Until one of them tried to touch him to get his attention and the white hot point pain agony dark.

Waking up was an experience. He had fevered dreams of women trying to get him to drink, of men stoking a fire, of words in a harsh tongue followed by pain shooting from his leg before the darkness overtook him again. He had no idea how long he spent drifting through fevered dreams; a state he'd hoped he had left behind when the serum was injected.

His first though without the haze was how itchy his foot was. The second was how warm it was and why are my eyelids glued shut? He started shifting only to discover his arms were tied to the rails of the bed. Panic began to creep through him as a noise from afar tried to get his attention.

"….ain! Please stop moving Sir! You are in no state! If you pause I can release the left wrist but please Sir, you need to stop." The words, while English, were spoken by a woman who was clearly not. He suspected she was Eastern European, if not outright Russian but he did as asked and held still.

"Thank you." He felt a slender hand hold his wrist as the cuff was removed. Seconds later he felt an ice chip on his lips. "Please relax Sir. We have a few questions and you need to speak for that." The hand grabbed his before he could reach up to his face. "Be careful Captain. There are bandages on your face due to the exposure burns. It's August 15, 1944. You are currently on a Russian Base. I'm the only translator they could get on short notice but the doctor and nurses should be in shortly. Can you tell me what you remember?"

"Crashing the plane?" Oh boy, his voice sounded even worse than he felt. "Crawling out as it filled with water, then walking. Oh, and bear men?"

"Those were the people that found you. Big and wearing skins. Now Captain America, we have sent Moscow that you are here but we've had a storm since then so we have no reply. You were very cold and if not for your healing you would be dead. As it was, it was close. The infection would not go down so we had to take the foot. This caused the fe…."

He didn't hear anything past that. The itching sensation suddenly made sense, along with the pain and sense of absence. He remembered catching his boot on the edge of the plane and ripping it along with the skin to get out. He remembered bandaging it up but the swelling and….

"Sir! Please stay awake. Please!"

"Steve." He managed to croak.

"Sir?"

"My name. It's Steve." Anything to keep his mind off the sudden feeling of missing.

"Steve. The doctor is bringing something for the pain. I'm sorry, I didn't think of shell shock. But that's why we tied you down. So you'd stop reaching for it and panicking."

Steve forced himself to stay awake but tuned the woman out as he tried to come to grips with what happened. A doctor came and went, as did a few nurses. He drifted in and out before finally succumbing to sleep.

The next week passed the same way. Alesia turned out to be not only the only translator but also the Base Commander Yankovich's wife. His Doctor was called Markov and the nurses were Misha and his wife Layla. He didn't see anyone else but he could hear them as they walked past the quarters they gave him. Someone found a shoe they jury rigged into a fake foot for Steve as soon as he was allowed to get up. It took getting use too, especially the effect it had on his balance. Layla and Alesia started teaching him ballet and folk dances to help while they waited for a reply. One week turned to two before slipping into three. A fourth found Steve sparring with Yankovich's men and re-learning hand to hand combat while compensating for the foot.

The fifth week brought a change. By now it was nearing the last of September and with the weather turning for the worse Moscow asked that he stay there and when spring broke the ice lock to send him by ship. He would be traded as a sign of goodwill to the Americans when the Nazis were defeated. So he stayed. Layla took him under her tutelage and he learned her actual role, that of a spy. He lost the clumsiness and gained a grace that he lacked after the serum. Yankovich treated him like any new recruit and he did runs, sentry duty, and manoeuvres with the rest of the men. Alesia taught him to breathe, to compartmentalize, and to work through his head. Together, they taught him Russian and Siberian along with their cultures. He met the natives of the area who had been the ones to rescue him in the first place.

It was finally the winter in the frozen north taught him how to temper his anger. The lack of sunlight and dropping temperature forced him to sit and think and allowed him to grieve properly for the first time since Italy when he heard Bucky was missing. It gave him the space to see that Peggy wasn't the be all to end all, she was just him trying to idealize his dreams. Dreams he'd give up in an instant to return to prewar Brooklyn, to Bucky and their rundown apartment, to home. He left in the spring of '45. Other than letters, a visit in '51 would be the next time he saw any of them.

\----

The trip to Moscow was long and bleak. It was easy to see signs of the war here and there, bombed out building and huge swaths of burnt land. The ship had become a train which filled with recruits and veterans, heading to be part of the push through to Germany. Steve felt restless and bored as the train went ever east and south.

\---

They were almost at Moscow when it happened. The first sign something was wrong was the slowing down of the train. Men peered out to see what was causing the delay only to hit the ground filled with lead seconds later. The slaughter lasted only a few minutes before everything was silent. Steve could hear broken gasps and gurgles around him. His leg was on fire and his arm was numb. The lack of blood was making his vision blurry but he could make out men in black making their way down the train. He heard voices as they stood over him speaking German and Russian before the sound of machine guns drowned them out as he slipped into darkness.

\---

Steve had never before had a reason to be happy for 'capitalist' paranoia until that day. But someone had overheard an interesting conversation and convinced their CO to send someone to investigate. Since a platoon needed some night training the CO agreed and the maneuvers were close enough when the firefight started to hear. They didn't make it in time to save most of the soldiers but they did manage to capture the perpetrators.

\-----------

HYDRA.

\-----------

Steve wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream. He literally dropped a plane in the ocean to stop them and this was the result? Once he was recovered enough he attended the questionings of the prisoners he found out that they had retreated across the continent ahead of the Howling Commandos. That while HYDRA was destroyed in the west it thrived in the east. So he did the only thing he could think of. He volunteered. It took a fair bit of convincing and bribery but he eventually ended up attached to a platoon tasked with removing HYDRA from the Motherland because 'they have no place in the next 5 year plan or any after that; they will not follow Marxism'.

Not that he was any good at communism himself. But his legend gave him some leeway and his actions aligned with theirs. His burning desire to burn HYDRA to the ground was tempered by his SIC, one Aleksei Volkov. Alec spent most of his time vetoing Steve's plans if he felt they were too reckless/ stupid/ or anything else over the top. They clashed to start with but soon managed a good working relationship followed by friendship. With discretion the name of the game, they slowly but surely dismantled HYDRA's foothold which lead to them hearing of a science branch that was supposedly worse than the rest.

Ironically it was the British who gave them the lead. While America and the USSR were involved in the Cold War, England and its spy agency, MI6 spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe on the wrong side of the iron curtain. It was in the early 50s when the mess with Spectre and several brainwashed 00agents happened. When they found the links to HYDRA they immediately got in contact with Steve's division commander. It was the first time in 7 or so years he spoke English. The agent he was dealing with, along with his American counterpart, just laughed as he attempted to force his mouth to speak a tongue he had known since birth. They traded information and started chasing ghosts. It wasn’t until several years later they learned of something called Department X and in 1954 there was a large multinational raid on Department X's headquarters.

\------

It had taken weeks to move everyone into position. The Brits had brought several troops with them, mostly SAS and SBS. Then there were mixed platoon from the western front along with men from all over the motherland. They set up blockades miles away and started to move in closer. It took 3 days to reach the complex itself and another day to crack its defenses. The men started to cautiously enter the complex only to stare in shock at what lay within. Steve saw men he knew worked at the labour camps and the prisons turn white and green, men who would scalp you for looking break down and cry. And when he finally saw what they saw well. There was a lot of information gathered with no survivors.

\-----

To this day Steve would maintain that was the day he changed. It wasn't the loss of Bucky, the crash, or the secrecy that meant nobody back home knew he was alive that caused him to give up Captain America. No, it was finding the children stolen after their families were slaughtered, the experiments, the chairs and cells, and torture chambers. The facility smelled of death and despair and Steve broke. Vengeance cannot stand up to the worst of humanity and even the mess in the eastern concentration camps didn’t measure near this. They removed what they could and torched the rest. Using the information gained and, with the assistance of the rest of the Siberian District, they wiped out Department X. Some of them escaped beyond the iron curtain but overall, the USSR was free of HYDRA.

\-----

When they reached the closest base Steve left Volkov in charge and went. He wandered a bit before settling down to help with harvest in a town. It was there he realized that war was not what he thought it would be when he was arguing back in Brooklyn. Hell, it wasn’t what anyone had though. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the dead and nightmares marred his sleep every night. He remembered what it was to stand up and fight bullies, not for the sake of fighting or out of some obligation owed to the dead. He found his way back to his men in the spring of 1955 and told them his decision. There was hugs and promises of drinks and debts owed to be cashed later and for the first time in 13 or so years he was no longer part of anyone’s army.

\-----

At that point the Russians agreed to trade him back as the Cold War began to hype up again. It was the fall of 1955 when he was loaded up onto a diplomatic plane near St. Petersburg and flown to Berlin. He was one of the few men to pass through the wall who was not military. It was jarring as hell to suddenly hear nothing but American accented English when he was collected from the checkpoint. They led him to a car and he was driven to an American base and flown straight for D.C. Or so he thought until one of his escort slipped a needle into his neck.

\----------------

Pain.

\----------------

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Have a great day/night/whatever time of day you read at.... smile.


End file.
